Iced Lemon Curd Birthday Cake

It was my grandad's birthday last Saturday. There was some debate amongst my older rellies about whether he was 92 or 93 this year. I don't know myself, you kind of have to take peoples word for that sort of thing don't you? Anyhow, I made him a cake. The recipe was based on Delia's Iced Lemon Curd Layer Cake. I have made it before and it is lovely but it ended up as just a sandwich cake, there was no way I could have cut the layers in half as they were too thin and it would have totally fallen apart. I am usually very good at doing as I'm told in recipes but there is something about Delia that makes me want to rebel. This recipe was too small anyway, as birthdays call for Big Cake!!

I made the whole quantity of mixture in Delia's recipe and put it all into one 20x24cm tin, then when that was done made another one as I only have one tin that size (don't feel sorry for me, I have far too many baking things.) While they were cooling I made the lemon curd, which is one of the easiest, most satisfying jobs ever! Shove a load of stuff in a bowl, set it on a saucepan and walk away from it for 20 minutes. There was just enough to sandwich the two halves together. I had to trim the bottom layer a bit so they fitted together. All going well so far. Then I made the icing to go on top. I doubled the amount but it wasn't quite enough and it had started to dry with bald patches around the edges. I quickly made some more and tried to fill in the gaps but it was starting to look a bit lumpy where the first lot met the second so I covered it in 100's and 1000's and it looked ok. By this time it was 1am so I didn't really have time to make any major mistakes. I had bought a cake frill to go round the outside, I love those things they cover a multitude of ugly cake moments with the minimum of effort and all for 70p.

As I said before I just don't do decorating at all so shop bought plastic thingies and sprinkles etc are my saviour. Some candles were put on after but we didn't light them as it would have set off the smoke alarms at the old folks home and we didn't want that, it wouldn't have made us very popular.

So there we go. Not as sophisticated as Delia's layer cake but everyone liked it.